Hello there! Thank you for landing on this! How serendipitous! If I could have a choice of not calling myself a tattoo artist and you could still find me, I would. However, this tattoo artist title is the closest metaphysical bus stop that allows you to be dropped off near me. Honestly speaking, it took me 30 plus years to get here myself. I knew I have always wanted to be an artist whose mission is to show up and express using whatever artistic medium required for the truest expressions to take form.

 

I have always lived in a story where my truest expressions are dismissed as the secretion of the ‘overthinking generation’ of the 21st century. I had little courage to let my natural form take space as an artist.

 

My parents put me in art school when I was 3 years old. The reason was that I was simply too efficient at decorating everything in the house with my watercolor markers (aka I was annoying as hell). Even though I had been learning drawing and painting the entire time till 18 and came to Canada alone for more learning, I was under the impression that my art* was innately irrelevant and, therefore, "useless". I needed to prove that my art was not. I had since developed a large technical vocabulary to eloquently express via 2D visual forms just to prove a point (well, honestly, I do really like the technical side of artmaking). I became a good craftsman using mark making tools but struggled to feel at peace with my art.

 

As I moved along my artmaking journey, I soon realized that the mere product of an impressive piece of work that is only for the purpose of pleasing the eyes makes the art feel like stale fast food; it feels withdrawn and artificial. My art is way more than what meets the eyes; it is all the breathes I took; all the marks I covered; all the thoughts that drifted by; all my struggles and tears; all that crossed in and out of my field... I find that artmaking has always been a breathing-and-living collaboration: a documentation of moments in life. Each time I made art, I felt that I had to be swallowed and spat out again onto the canvas. It would literally feel like a birth; it's just that I am both the mother and the child.

 

This took me years and years to put down into legible words that my art has never been about the end result. My art not only takes the shape in a temporal sense, it also has presence spatially. The moment when an idea/thought/entity collides with mine, the art has been made. And then all I have to do is to transmit and deliver the art to you as we speak. As easy as that sounds, it's a bold and delicate process that will always demand the entirety of my being.

 

In this sense, I do not sell my art as just a tangible piece, be it a painting, a tattoo, or in some other form. My art is an experience encapsulated in a tangible piece. The price tag is to sustain the life energy, time, skill, space required to give birth to this art through the collision of me as a whole with another entity, be it a thought, a person, a sentiment.

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*I am only writing "my" due to the fact that I can only speak for myself as an artist. However, based on some conversations had with some colleagues, this feeling of needing to prove oneself seems to be universal.